Follow our easy steps to help with create a training manual that makes following processes and using tools and technologies as simple and straightforward as possible for your users.
Training manuals have long been a staple of instructional literature, playing an essential role in guiding users through various products and processes.
Chances are, you've encountered countless training manuals throughout your life, often accompanying consumer products. In today's fast-paced digital landscape, the significance of well-crafted training manuals has only increased, extending beyond consumer products to encompass corporate tools, technologies, and procedures.
However, not all training manuals are equally effective in empowering users and facilitating understanding. For businesses aiming to instruct internal or external audiences, it's crucial to develop training manuals that are comprehensive, user-friendly, easily navigable, and readily accessible when users need them the most.
Regardless of your business's specific focus, this blog post will provide insights on designing training manuals that streamline the learning process, making it effortless for users to grasp processes, tools, and technologies.
Why does your business need training manuals? There are two primary reasons:
It’s that simple. Training manuals are either how-to guides for using tools and technologies, or they are step-by-step guides to how to complete a task. Organizations typically create manuals for a range of specific purposes, including:
Creating a training manual isn’t just a box to check when any of the situations listed above arises. Training manuals can provide tangible benefits to your business when created thoughtfully and shared with the right audiences.
When you follow the right training manual creation process, you do your business and its bottom line a favor. Here’s a look at the specific training manual benefits you enjoy when you put the time, effort, and energy required into training content.
Employees spend almost 20% of their time looking for information to do their jobs effectively. That’s like spending an entire workday, once a week, wasting precious time searching for information that should be readily available.
An effective training manual can help reduce this percentage. When you create easy-to-find, easy-to-navigate training manuals, your employees are more productive. There’s less time spent searching and more time spent doing.
An overwhelming 96% of customers believe that a positive customer experience is the key to fostering brand loyalty. If customers struggle to understand how to use your product or navigate your suggested procedures, their experience deteriorates and loyalty diminishes.
Intentionally crafted training manuals can effectively address this issue. By providing clear instructions on product usage and outlining essential processes, these manuals can significantly enhance the customer experience and bolster brand loyalty.
The average support ticket costs $15.56 to resolve in North America. That may not sound like much, but products with thousands of users can exponentially multiply that cost when support tickets increase.
There’s a simple way to help limit the number of support tickets your business processes. When you create training documentation that comprehensively provides guidance and answers frequently asked questions, many customers find the information they need before submitting support tickets.
The cost of creating an effective training material pales in comparison to the cost of handling increased support tickets.
Modern organizations thrive when they’re aligned on strategy and processes. In fact, strategically aligned companies churn 36% fewer customers and close 38% more sales. Effective training manuals are a way to align your people around common strategies, processes and approaches.
Learning and constant improvement should be important parts of your corporate culture. When you create and share effective training manuals, you reinforce the emphasis on education and help create a culture of learning.
Having the right process is important for anyone wondering how to create an effective training manual. The process doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to be comprehensive if you want a training manual that truly helps your target audience.
Here are 6 steps you can take to create your next training manual.
Who is this training manual for? Just like any content, an instructor’s guide needs to be highly targeted to a well-defined audience.
For example, if you’re creating an introductory manual for users of a product, create and present information in a way that will be most helpful for them. If you’re creating a training manual for account executives on your sales team, do the same thing — create and present the information in a way that will help them work efficiently and effectively.
Before you start creating, build a training outline that you will use to flesh out the manual. While your training manual might include any number of sections specific to your process or product, consider adding the following:
In what form will the training manual be made available? Traditionally, training manuals have been printed on paper and distributed to anyone who needed them. Things are different in the 21st century.
Training manuals exist as video series, as online courses, as knowledge bases, etc. Your training manual may need to exist in more than one form. No matter how it needs to exist, determine the medium before you start developing and designing content.
There are certain best practices that will apply to any medium you use for a training manual.
For example, you should always make training content as clear and minimal as possible. Every word needs to earn its way onto the page or screen.
Also, double-check to ensure your content supports the training you have designed. It’s easy for things to get lost in translation or miss the mark for the target audience during the content development and design process.
Finally, introduce objectives clearly, no matter the medium used. Clearly shared objectives provide the why behind your training: Why is this product or process important? Why does this training matter? Why do I have to consume this content? Objectives help get buy-in from your target audience.
Aside from the universal training manual best practices, there are also best practices for any specific medium.
When writing a training manual, use short paragraphs and sections with subheadings. Doing so will help readers skim to find information that’s relevant to them. Make use of visuals and bolding to drive home key points.
For video training manuals, create storyboards to make your video as concise as possible. Write scripts ahead of time to ensure that all points are addressed.
For course-style training manuals, use post-section quizzes to ensure your audience members are understanding key information. Quizzes can also help boost retention.
You need analytics tied to your training manuals. Analytics let you know how many people are accessing your manuals and how they are using them.
And don’t stop at analytics. Once you have data to analyze, use your analysis to make updates to your training manuals. Because few training manuals are printed on paper today, there’s an opportunity to constantly update and optimize them. View your training manuals as dynamic pieces of content that can be altered at any time for maximum impact.
This is mentioned as the last step, but it’s something you need to do throughout the manual creation process: Get feedback from key stakeholders.
You never want to create a training manual in a vacuum. If you’re creating a manual for an internal team, talk to managers and frontline workers who will be using the manual. Conduct regular check-ins that allow these stakeholders to review outlines and first drafts. Use their feedback to make updates.
The same holds true of training manuals for external audiences. Test your content on existing users or customers, and then use your learnings to optimize your manual.
Whether training manuals are created for internal or external audiences, offer clear feedback channels. Again, training manuals are dynamic in the modern age, and feedback channels allow you to update them regularly to maximize performance.
Don’t Forget Design Considerations
While training manuals are utilitarian in nature, design still matters. Make using your training manual as enjoyable as possible by including:
You may have in-house design resources you can use when creating training manuals. If not, maximize the effectiveness of your manuals by contracting with outside resources.
Training manuals don’t help if audience members can’t find them. You need to have a promotion campaign associated with the launch of your training manuals.
Make training manuals findable on your intranet for internal audiences and on your support site for external audiences. Encourage audience members to bookmark a manual’s location. Follow up via email or other channels to remind the target audience of the manual’s existence — especially after significant updates.
This is why it’s so important to track the usage of your training manual, as noted above. By tracking usage, you’ll know whether or not your manual is findable enough.
Wondering how to write a training manual? Creating effective training manuals can be a lengthy process that’s well worth it in the end — as demonstrated by the benefits above. If you need to move fast, you can accelerate the launch of your training manual by using high-quality knowledge base software.
At Helpjuice, we provide easy-to-use, powerful knowledge base software that empowers you to launch helpful, findable training manuals. We help our users scale their support teams and enhance collaboration across their organizations.
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